{"id":102,"date":"2025-07-09T15:35:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T15:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.routledgelearning.com\/americangovernment\/?p=102"},"modified":"2025-08-14T21:57:47","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T21:57:47","slug":"chapter-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.routledgelearning.com\/americangovernment\/chapter-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 14"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Civil Rights: Where Liberty and Equality Collide<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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This chapter was dedicated to a presentation of civil rights that serve as calls for government intervention on our individual behalf in order to ensure equal treatment for all within our society. This process began with the Civil War Amendments, especially the Fourteenth Amendment\u2019s due process clause. However, for the first hundred years the courts took an economic based interpretation of this clause, which served to hinder rather than help the cause of individual civil rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the 1960s though, a new court with a new agenda had effectively sounded the death knell for Jim Crow segregation in the South with the landmark Brown v. Board<\/em> (1954) decision overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson<\/em> (1896) doctrine of \u201cseparate but equal.\u201d Energetic presidents Kennedy and Johnson, along with the Congress, spearheaded the winds of change with a series of acts that collectively enfranchised the African-American South and set up a system of affirmative action to address racial and gender inequalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the late 1970s, conservatives counteracted previous advancements of affirmative action with decisions like the Bakke<\/em> case in 1978, which struck down racial quotas. This activity was continued into the 1980s and beyond with the Rehnquist and now Robert\u2019s Court\u2019s rollback on affirmative action and school desegregation issues. However, in the 2000s, certain extensions of civil rights have been accorded to previously unknown groups regarding this phenomenon, such as in the Court\u2019s reaffirming affirmative action considerations of race in Fisher v. University of Texas <\/em>and the right of gay couples to marry in Obergefell v. Hodges<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chapter also discusses the issue of civil rights through their manifestation as social movements, which are collective enterprises that attempt to change the organizational design or characteristic operating procedures of a society in order to produce changes in the way the society distributes opportunities and rewards. Social movements are said to arise from a combination of expanding political opportunities, mobilization of indigenous organizational resources, and the presence of certain shared cognitions or values amidst a group that gives it momentum. Social movements are seen by the author to reflect the larger historical frame of which they are a part. For instance, the abolitionist, labor, and women\u2019s suffrage movements all occurred within a free labor, entrepreneurship, and right to contract frame. Meanwhile, the movements of the 1960s like civil rights and others were joined together by an equal rights frame. The chapter then goes on to discuss the abolitionist, civil rights, and women\u2019s movements in order to showcase the pursuit, receipt, and even rejection of civil rights guarantees to these various groups and their attendant social movements. Finally, the chapter also includes a more recent battleground for civil rights with the debate over gay marriage as it currently rages across our collective landscape as well as a nod to the #MeToo movement and sexual harassment. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Quizzes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n